Power consumption management of the various system hardware components in a computing device, such as network adapters, display interfaces, input/output devices, cameras, etc., becomes more challenging as more computing devices become mobile and depend on battery power as a primary power source. Various modules in an operating system (OS) contribute to the management of power, such as deciding when a hardware component may transition to a low power mode. Applications and OS modules, however, can block system hardware components from going to low power. For example, some computing systems rely on applications to register their use of a system device when the device is needed by the application and release the device when the application no longer needs to use the device. This arrangement can block the hardware component from transitioning to low power mode, even for a brief period, when the device is not in use because applications often do not reliably register and release their requests to use the hardware component. Often the device could have transitioned to a lower power state, thus drawing less power from the battery than if the device had not transitioned to a low power state.